Thoughts about bookplates, or ex libris

Tag Archives: Amy McGregor-Radin

Printing bookplates brings the surprising opportunity to learn about interesting projects, non-profit organizations, and companies around the world. We have printed bookplates for George and Barbara Bush to sign for a cookbook of their recipes, as an incentive for Kickstarter campaigns, and for politicians to sign at speaking engagements.

One of our most loyal and lovely customers is Claire Insalata Poulos, the founder of a wonderful organization that helps feed those in need. Claire had been ordering bookplates for years before I realized what important work her organization was doing.

Claire founded Table to Table in 1999, after volunteering at a food bank. According to tabletotable.org, “working at the food bank opened the eyes of this chef trained, marketing professional to a horrifying truth: tons of healthy, usable, fresh food was being thrown out and wasted every single day. With the help of New York City’s City Harvest, a handful of committed chef friends and a few volunteers, Table to Table started rescuing the excess fresh food from three local restaurants and a few grocery stores. The first two recipients of this free, wholesome food were two local soup kitchens. Today, its fleet of five refrigerated trucks serves over 80 hunger relief agencies throughout northern New Jersey.”

The food Table to Table’s trucks collect is donated by approximately 200 supermarkets, restaurants, and distributors and delivered to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, after-school programs and homes for the elderly. Corporate sponsors and chefs such as Thomas Keller, Emeril Lagasse, Tom Colicchio, Lidia Bastianich, Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali have all helped support Table to Table’s mission.

Table to Table uses bookplates when they honor authors. The bookplates can be sent to the author for signing and transported more easily than the books themselves. Claire orders design, MR100, shown on the right. This artwork, by Provincetown, MA, artist Amy McGregor-Radin, is one of our more contemporary offerings. We alter the design by leaving off the “This book belongs to” text. This leaves plenty of space for authors to sign below the appropriately food-themed, bright artwork.

Table to Table has now served more than 122 million meals in New Jersey and is a consistently top-rated charity. Truly it is inspiring to see what one woman’s vision and the help of others could accomplish.

Through Google Analytics, I can see which websites “referred” people to bookplateink.com. Or, in other words, it shows which websites include a link that someone clicked to access our site. Yesterday, I decided to look at as many of these sites as I could. What an interesting and wonderful collection of websites! Here is a short description of several of them:

• Author Nina Sankovitch offers a signed bookplate on her site, readallday.org. Sankovitch spent one year reading one book a day and writing about each book on her site. She also wrote a memoir, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, focusing on her life of reading. Her website is chock full of information about reading.

• On his blog, Steven Gomez, whose pen name is C.S. Gomez, posted an entry about cultivating a personal library. Step number ten is: “Bookplates are essential.”

• The site Bibliobabe.com is full of book recommendations, encouragement for teen readers, and other information. As stated on the site, “Bibliobabe is a blog dedicated to all things reading: book news, awards updates, free book giveaways, teen links and books news, reviews and book journal comments.” Included on the site is a very informative page about bookplates.

• Booksilly is a great website to visit during the holiday season. As stated on the site, “It’s a world of gifts and products for the avid reader, bibliophile, librarian, teacher, bookaholic and anyone else just silly about books!!!” Of course, I was happy to see bookplates right near the top of their offerings.

• One of the more interesting and yet obscure sites I found is http://exlibris.lap.hu/. The site is in Hungarian, but when translated, it seems to be comprised of lists of artists, Facebook pages, and bookplate suppliers, among other things. Included in the listing is Bookplate Ink.

• Lew Jaffe is a longtime collector of bookplates. On his blog, which is updated every Sunday, he shares information about his purchases, bookplate artists, and bookplate history.

• The Bookplate Society, based in the United Kingdom, is “an international society of collectors, bibliophiles, artists and others dedicated to promoting bookplate study. Their “purpose is to encourage the production, use, collecting, and study of bookplates.” Their resource page has many helpful links.

• My hometown and home of the bookplate business, Yellow Springs, Ohio, is a wonderful village with an interesting history that is celebrated by its residents. The Yellow Springs Historical Society is instrumental in keeping this history alive.

• One of the sites I was not surprised to see is that of my good friend, artist and cartoonist Jennifer Berman. We have some of her beautiful animal block prints as part of our bookplate gallery, and other products with her artwork are available on her website.

• Evelia, whose artwork can be seen in products at Target, Pier 1, and other major companies, has a gallery of colorful and artistic bookplates at Bookplateink.com. Her entire product line can be seen on her website.

• And finally, I was happy to see that an article written about bookplates in the Wall Street Journal in 2007 is still available on the internet. After all these years, it is still bringing customers to Bookplate Ink.